Thursday, August 14, 2008

David Bottoms, professor of Creative Writing at Georgia State University and native of Canton, Ga., has been selected for membership in the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame. Established in 2000 by the University Libraries at the University of Georgia, the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame honors the state’s most influential writers including Margaret Mitchell, Flannery O’Conner, Alice Walker, W.E.B. Du Bois and President Jimmy Carter. Bottoms will be inducted into the Hall of Fame during ceremonies March 23-24 at the University of Georgia.

Bottoms received the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets in 1979 for his first book of poetry, “Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump.” His poetry has been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Paris Review and many others. In addition, he has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 2000, Georgia Governor Roy Barnes appointed Bottoms the state’s Poet Laureate.

Bottoms holds the John B. and Elena Diaz-Verson Amos Distinguished Chair in English Letters at Georgia State, where he is a founding co-editor of the literary magazine Five Points.